Sex Crime Photos
“No sooner was Dale W. Weeks in prison for the vicious rape of a Walton County woman than he requested police investigation photos of his nude, brutalized victim. The graphic photos reveal the bruised and bitten genital areas of the woman that he tortured, sexually assaulted and sodomized for six hours in September 1995. When the State Attorney’s Office refused to turn over the photos, Weeks, 45, filed a lawsuit under the Florida Sunshine Law, which makes most government records available to the public. The State Attorney’s Office lost its battle in court when the 1st District Court of Appeal in Tallahassee ruled that the photos had to be released… On May 1, the Legislature unanimously passed the Victim of Sex Offense Public Records Law, which says photos or videotapes of sexual-assault victims are exempt from the Sunshine Law and cannot be made public.” — Pensacola News Journal (US)
When a sex criminal requests police photos of his sex crime, should he be allowed to have them? Legally, it would seem, you can’t deny him the right to review evidence in his own trial. However, at the same time you don’t want to give him the ability to savor and, in a certain respect, even prolong his crime. It’s like giving heroin to a drug felon. So how do you define that narrow line between ensuring due process and promoting deviant perversion? Are the photos legal documents or criminal trophies? Evidence or pornography?
By creating an exemption to their disclosure law, the Florida legislature effectively decided to employ a double standard: the photos are to be considered evidence for law enforcement, but when the accused wants to review them, they are to be considered pornography. Legally, such a double standard is questionable: there may well be pervy cops or pathological law clerks who get off on sex-crime photos, and there may well be a need for an accused sex criminal to review photographic evidence of his alleged crimes. Conversely, though from the legal standpoint this may be an inconsistency, at the same time it no doubt expresses the true state of affairs: the sex criminal probably wanted the pictures to savor his crime, not to defend himself.
But then again, how can the government presume the right to determine what is or isn’t sexually stimulating to the accused? How can it decide what, for him, is or isn’t pornography? If it presumes the right to determine what he can look at, will it also decide it can determine what he can write about? Talk about? Think about?
Your problem, professor, is that you assume this guy’s guilty, first off. Maybe he’s just trying to build up evidence for his case.
Furthermore, any defendant should be entitled 100% to the prosecution’s alleged “evidence” — don’t we all agree?
If he’s been a bad boy — then — he doesn’t need the pictures to “savor” past events. It’s all in his mind, as the goth song says.
Kill ‘em all and let God sort ‘em out! But give everyone access to the INFORMATION!
By the way, George Bush is a Jew.
– sloopy
If George Bush is a Jew, are you implying that the Israelites’ commandment against idolatry pertained to the denial of sex crime photos to the accused?
I am not really conversant with American law, but even if he wanted to review the pictures as evidence, why does he need them himself? Can’t they give the pictures to the defense lawyer but forbid the accused to keep copies?
Besides, it isn’t just the fact that these pictures would be available to the criminal - according to the article, they fell under a law that made them “available to the public”. Which sounds like it means anybody can get them. (Maybe this isn’t the case, I don’t know, but that’s what it sounds like.) If you were raped and tortured, would you really want people to be allowed to request the explicit photos of you?
I don’t think the victim photos should get in the hands of anyone who wants to exploit or further hurt the families and they should ne kept under lock and key that can only be seen by the guardians of such deviants. If the photos leak out to creeps like people who run this site, then the state or the guardians should be held liable for tampering with evidence, exploiting a crime and trying to profit. Before I die this will be a reality I can assure you of that.
If more of the controlling type presidents like “w”(the “president of the united states of america?,…right!) get into office, then a reality as perversily controlling as you speak of will be reality. I do not want to be told what victimless crimes are morally right and wrong by my government.
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